rsuasive conclusion, I led my wife to her fauteuil, and
resigned her to the care of a distinguished Roman prince who was her
next partner. Then, unobserved, I slipped out to make inquiries
concerning Vincenzo. He had gone; one of the waiters at the hotel, a
friend of his, had accompanied him and seen him into the train for
Avellino. He had looked in at the ball-room before leaving, and had
watched me stand up to dance with my wife, then "with tears in his
eyes"--so said the vivacious little waiter who had just returned from
the station--he had started without daring to wish me good-bye.

I heard this information of course with an apparent kindly
indifference, but in my heart I felt a sudden vacancy, a drear, strange
loneliness. With my faithful servant near me I had felt conscious of
the presence of a friend, for friend he was in his own humble,
unobtrusive fashion; but now I was alone--alone in a loneliness beyond
all conceivable comparison--alone to do my work, without prevention or
detection. I felt, as it were, isolated from humanity, set apart with
my victim on some dim point of time, from which the rest of the world
receded, where the searching eye of the Creator alone could behold me.
Only she and I and God--these three were all that existed for me in the
universe; between these three must justice be fulfilled.

Musingly, with downcast eyes, I returned to the ball-room. At the door
a young girl faced me--she was the only daughter of a great Neapolitan
house. Dressed in pure white, as all such maidens are, with a crown of
snow-drops on her dusky hair, and her dimpled face lighted with
laughter, she looked the very embodiment of early spring. She addressed
me somewhat timidly, yet with all a child's frankness.

"Is not this delightful? I feel as if I were in fairy-land! Do you know
this is my first ball?"

I smiled wearily.

"Ay, truly? And you are happy?"

"Oh, happiness is not the word--it is ecstasy! How I wish it could last
forever! And--is it not strange?--I did not know I was beautiful till
to-night."

She said this with perfect simplicity, and a pleased smile radiated her
fair features. I glanced at her with cold scrutiny.

"Ah! and some one has told you so."

She blushed and laughed a little consciously.

"Yes; the great Prince de Majano. And he is too noble to say what is
not true, so I MUST be 'la piu bella donzella,' as he said, must I not?"

I touched the snow-drops that she wore in a white